


Lying Tells the Truth

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Multi, but not in this, post Season 1 finale, references to unreliable narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 20:30:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7860067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard Snart is a liar.</p>
<p>Len lied constantly, well and badly, big and small, with a smile on his lips or a blush on his cheeks, with tears in his eyes or a scowl of rage. Mick learned quickly enough that you couldn't trust a word the man said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lying Tells the Truth

Leonard Snart is a liar.

Mick knows this, has always known it, has known it from the first day he asked a man who everyone called Leo what his name was and the man told him it was Len.

Len lied constantly, well and badly, big and small, with a smile on his lips or a blush on his cheeks, with tears in his eyes or a scowl of rage. Mick learned quickly enough that you couldn't trust a word the man said. 

It didn't matter what he said.

Len told his parole officer that he was thinking of going straight, of giving up a life of crime, that maybe if he could just get a job, he'd be able to put it all behind him, and he got custody of Lisa while his father was in the clink.

Len told his sister that he hated ice cream, that it gave him clenching stomachaches, so she should eat all of his.

Len told Mick that he liked bar fights, and that he was happy at home, and that there was nothing Mick could do to help him.

Len told Mick that he annoyed him, that he was a waste of time and effort, that he was only breaking him out of jail because it would take too long to break in a new guy the way Len liked it. He said that the first time he broke Mick out, and the second, and the seventh, and the thirteenth. 

Len told the world he loved the cold.

It’s a good thing Len doesn’t love anyone but Lisa and Mick, or else Mick would spend a lot more time having to clean up after Len’s lies. 

He’s in the cargo hold, cleaning the guns – his and Len’s, of course, but they’re both his right now – and Sara drifts into his peripheral vision. He inclines his head a little at the seat next to her; she’s not that bad, as far as teammates go. Even though she’s probably here to talk to him about his so-called grief. That's probably since he’s been cleaning the guns for the last four hours.

Not his fault the guns are hard to keep in working order.

Not his fault he has two of them to watch over now.

“It must be hard without him,” Sara starts tentatively.

Mick grunts, since there’s nothing he can say without it being patently obvious. 

“I mean, you’ve been friends for something like, what, thirty years now?” she says. 

He frowns at her. She’s not far off, but he’s not _that_ old. He says as much.

“He told me how you met in juvie,” she says, smiling a little in memory. “How you saved his life.”

“I was twenty,” Mick says. “Got hired for a Family job, since I couldn’t get anything else. Len was breaking into their place and I caught him, but I let him go because they paid me to sit there and do nothing without orders, because they thought I was dumb, and because I hated them. He got what he wanted, but he came back the next night anyway and said he’d decided he was stealing me, too.”

Sara frowns at him, confused.

“How we met,” Mick clarifies. “I never went to juvie. You can check my record, if you like.”

“But…I thought…”

Mick shakes his head. “Formally diagnosed pyromania with a tendency towards arson, and it was in the seventies,” he explains. “They institutionalized me instead.”

“But he said…”

“Snart lies,” Mick says.

She’s getting angry, which people sometimes do; Mick’s never understood it. What does it matter if Len lied? It’s what he does. What he did. Len’s a born storyteller. The words, the story, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what he _means_ by it. 

“I kissed him, you know,” she tells him, and he can see in her eyes that she means for it to hurt. Whether she means it to hurt Len, or Mick, or herself, Mick’s not sure. “Right before he died. He’d told me he was thinking about the future. Our future, together.”

Len had liked Sara. He’d idly sketched out plans for a team of super criminals sometimes, speaking aloud to no one in particular, sitting in Mick’s bedroom, curled up on the bed like a frightened child. The Rogues, he said with a smile. They’d be the best villains a superhero could have: clever and diverse and wicked, and they would never aim to hurt or destroy, only to steal. 

Len never lied when he planned. 

He hadn’t said anything about Sara, but he’d sketched out her supervillain costume and left it where Mick could find it. 

There was a lot of gold mixed in with the white. 

Len had said that Mick should think about hooking up with Sara, that she thought he was hot, that she liked him, that he thought they’d be good together. Mick had known better than to believe him.

“He might’ve meant it,” Mick offers, as gently as he can. 

“But you think he was lying,” she says. 

“Snart lies,” Mick repeats. “Sometimes it’s straight up fabrication, sometimes it’s just misdirection.”

“Then what…?”

“He thought you’d be good for his sister, I think,” Mick tells her honestly, because Len's brain may work in strange ways but Mick knows each and every one of them. “Len’s never given Lisa a car he hasn’t taken for a spin first.”

Sara looks offended. 

“If he’d wanted you to have sex with Lisa, he’d have slept with you,” Mick clarifies. “He was looking for romance instead. It was a compliment.”

“How do you know what was between us was a lie?” she demands, crossing her arms. “Maybe what he told you was the lie.”

Mick shakes his head. If Len had looked him in the eyes and told him, sincerely, that he was in love with Sara, he would have known it was a lie. If Len had told him he hated her or that she bored him or that she ticked him off, he would have known that was a lie, too. Instead, Len had said nothing, and Mick had known everything.

Sara will get over it. She usually prefers women; she’s said so herself. Len’s the exception to everybody’s rule, when he puts in the effort to be.

On the other hand, maybe she won’t. Mick certainly never got over Len, not from the start. It's worth thinking about. 

“He told Ray that his father took him on jobs when he was a kid, taught him how to break into systems,” she says. “Was that a lie?”

“Len’s dad’s an old-school mechanic,” Mick tells her. “He hates electronics systems; prefers a stethoscope and fingers to anything else. Every job he ever did, he hired someone else to deal with the electronics. They offer trade school in prison: how to be an electrician, that sort of thing. Len took the classes and picked it up that way.”

“He told Jax his father beat him.”

“He never said that,” Mick corrects her. “He told Jax that his father never raised a hand to him and his mom till he got back from prison.”

“And how would you know that’s a lie?” she asks. She’s challenging him now, trying to find a truth in Len’s words when the truth is right there, plain and obvious. “You weren’t there. You don’t know.”

“Hospital records don’t lie,” Mick says. “Prison records don’t lie. Lewis Snart got tossed in lockup overnight following a domestic disturbance at his household three times before Len hit the age of four, and his mother in the hospital at the same time with finger-shaped bruises and a black eye or two. Not that anyone cared, of course; he was drunk, and it happened, and he was a cop. But they separated them for the night to make sure nothing got out of hand.”

“Do you go around verifying everything Len says?” she sneers.

“Used to, before I realized there wasn’t any point to it,” Mick admits. “Took me nearly five years to suss out what types of foods he actually liked and which ones he was just pretending to. After that I realized there wasn’t any point in it.”

“He said he didn’t care about you,” she says, and this time she means it as a kindness. “He said he was done with you, that you had nothing more to talk about.”

“Snart lies,” Mick says, and smiles. 

“That ring of his,” she says, curious now. “Your first job together; a warehouse in Freeport..? It was the only thing you could get because the alarm system was upgraded unexpectedly. Or so he said.”

Mick snorts. “I bought him that ring fair and square, with money I earned working construction one day,” he tells her. “It was for the wedding. Lisa wanted it to be all above-board, you know, and I figured it wouldn't be too hard to please her.”

He sees her mouth the word 'wedding', swallow it, understand. 

“I am sorry he’s gone,” she says, and puts her hand on his in sympathy.

Mick shakes his head. “He told me I’d lose him forever, you know,” he tells her mildly. “Said it with a grin on his face and a twinkle in his eye, no less. Said that he’d die and no one would remember him, that I’d have to live alone without him.”

Sara frowns. “But you said he lies.”

“He does lie,” Mick says, turning back to Len’s gun. “He always lies.”

“But he _is_ gone,” she says, because she doesn’t understand. “You realize that, right?”

“You’re asking the wrong question, birdie,” he says, focusing on cleaning the muzzle of the cold gun. 

“I don’t understand,” she says.

Mick wonders if he’s overestimated her.

“Wait,” she says a moment later. “When did he tell you all that? There wasn’t time for him to say it at the Oculus.”

“No, there wasn’t,” Mick says, pleased. She’s as good as Len had never said; she’d make a fine addition to their Rogues. Len’s favorite story, Len’s favorite plan. Mick'll make sure it goes forward in his absence, just as he always does. “He told it to me when I was Kronos, when I was hunting you guys down, that time I ran into him in 1912, Southampton. One of the Waverider’s missions.”

“But we’ve never been to Southampton!” she exclaims. “Or the 1910s!”

“No,” Mick says. “We haven't. Not yet.”

He reaches out and puts his hand on hers.

She wouldn’t be good for Lisa, anyway. Not when she fits in between Len and Mick so well she fills holes they didn’t even know were there. Not when she can learn to love the lies that Len tells, the same way Mick did. There’s a preciously few people who can do that.

Plus, Mick loves making Len into a liar. 

(Maybe the next time Len tells his origin story, a white canary will have been there all along.)


End file.
